Analysis: NATO Summit Leaves Several Challenges Unaddressed

TaiwanPlus News

This year's NATO summit at The Hague saw a historic commitment to increase defense spending across the alliance, but several fundamental challenges remain. Those include uncertainty over the U.S.'s continued commitment to NATO under U.S. President Donald Trump and a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Senior Consulting Fellow from Chatham House Keir Giles joins TaiwanPlus News to discuss what the summit entailed, and what was left out.

Transcript

00:00Kir, this NATO meeting was surrounded by a lot of dramatic headlines, including the Iran-Israel

00:05conflict, Donald Trump making his presence well known at NATO. But what is the headline that caught

00:09your attention? It's more what has been left out of the summit that is important. Some of the

00:15things that were anticipated have come to pass, like the supposed 5% made up of 3.5% of GDP on

00:22defense, plus another 1.5% of associated spending that supports defense. Now, that, of course,

00:28is not a particularly meaningful figure because, after all, these targets have been there before

00:32and NATO nations have consistently failed to meet them, plus Donald Trump has said the US itself is

00:37exempt. But it's really just a symptom of the way the real problems with NATO have been pushed under

00:42the carpet. This is presented as a success in the same way that keeping Donald Trump and the United

00:48States on side is presented as a success. And that speaks to just how dangerous the situation was for

00:54NATO. It's being treated as a positive outcome that the alliance didn't fall apart altogether

00:59as a result of Donald Trump being put in the same room with the Europeans whose commitment to defense

01:05he's been so repeatedly questioning. So what is it then that NATO needs to really do to close that gap

01:12between defense spending and then actual hardening the defense of Europe? Well, one thing that's been

01:18overlooked again in this summit is that NATO has already laid out very clearly what it thinks it

01:24needs to deal with all the potential problems that are coming down the track, up to and including

01:28a direct challenge from Russia. And that's where the gap in terms of what NATO needs and what it can

01:34actually provide really shows up. Each country has a list of things that it is supposed to contribute

01:39to the alliance. Very few are actually capable of doing so. And that would be a far more realistic

01:44measure of what NATO needs to do now in order to be relevant, rather than a percentage of a fairly

01:50arbitrary number, which is based on GDP. So to ask directly about Donald Trump, he really made his

01:55presence known here commenting that he may not believe Article 5 is entirely binding. There are

02:00some very odd comments during the conference. What do you make of his presence there this year?

02:06Everybody's been hanging on Trump's every word to try to get some kind of clue as to what he's

02:11thinking. But of course, that's of limited use when what he's thinking seems to change so rapidly from

02:16one day to the next. The underlying problem, of course, is that the current United States

02:20administration sees itself as a partner with Russia rather than a country that needs to defend

02:26itself against Russia. And that, of course, compromises the whole structure of NATO deterrence,

02:31which is founded on the United States being there as the guarantor of security. That's what's got

02:36Europe so worried. The fact that with the case study, with the stress test of Ukraine, the United

02:41States has come down in so many cases on the side of Russia. So at the beginning of the conference,

02:46Mark Root said that the Taiwan Strait cannot be seen as a distant issue and that Beijing may call

02:52on Russia as a junior partner. I want to get your opinion and analysis on those comments.

02:58Nobody in Europe thinks that the war in Ukraine is a local issue anymore because Russia has already

03:04pulled in Asian partners to join in its war. Iran, North Korea, indirectly China, all already involved

03:12in this onslaught on Europe. So there is already a global conflict underway. And it's reasonable to

03:18assume that if China were interested in taking advantage of the opportunity that's presented by

03:22the United States' hesitancy in deterring aggression, then Russia might well be enlisted as a junior

03:28partner to create a distraction elsewhere. It is a global problem. And more and more people,

03:33particularly in Europe, are recognising this.

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